About

Originally from Memphis, TN, Ondine Geary is a Boulder-based choreographer, interdisciplinary performance artist, collaborator, and improviser. Her work plays at the intersection of art, the body and critical, social engagement.

Her decades-long performance career has stretched from San Francisco to Mumbai, and her own choreographic work has been presented nationally and internationally. She often collaborates with other Colorado-based artists, such as Laura Ann Samuelson and Kate Speer, and is a consistent dancer in the work of Guggenheim-award winner Michelle Ellsworth.

In addition to Ellsworth, Geary has danced works by an array of notable artists, including Rennie Harris, Faye Driscoll, Gesel Mason Performance Projects, John Jasperse, Peter Carpenter, Teena Marie Custer, Tere O’Connor, William Forsythe, and NYC-based Third Rail Projects.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I make dances that are scrappy, unruly and resourceful. They slip themselves into the crevices between genres and insist on using whatever was lost down there--chicken bones, loose wires, half-retrieved memories. Their curiosity is corporeal, their solution somatic. Their point of entry and exit is always the body.

My dances are both deeply personal and irrepressibly political; these days, I am as influenced by the news cycle as the moon’s cycle. They often begin as improvisations, which is my attempt to crack through to the subconscious and find places where I feel lost. There, I mine the dark night sky of my interior life and, when I come across something terrifying or intriguing, I broadcast radio signals back down to Earth. And the personal becomes the political. My loneliness as a mother becomes an investigation into the invisibility of care-taking labor. Challenges in collaboration become an inquiry into the ways in which women negotiate power in the era of Trump. Death becomes passage through the Tor network’s exit nodes, and grief becomes draining whey.

While I am driven by a sense of political responsibility and seek to excavate the body in the body politic, I don’t believe art is the same as activism. I am under no illusions that dance will save us. But maybe, when it's doing its job, it will revive us--even sustain us--and insist that we remember why we were in the fight to begin with.